The “Lending of Digital Books” panel—which also featured OverDrive marketing associate Dan Stasiewski—was largely geared toward introducing publishers to library ebook lending, and, as such, was mostly old hat to those in the library world. LJ readers, for example, will be familiar with the Open Library’s unique license-free ebook lending model. He even showed the Open Library page for Amanda Hocking’s Torn, noting that she and other authors, such as mystery writer J.A. Konrath, explicitly gave their consent to be part of the Open Library. (Hocking’s ebooks, as previously mentioned in LJ Insider, are currently only lendable via the Open Library.)

But there was at least one new wrinkle: IA, Brantley said, was thinking about giving publishers a “Library Option” for their ebooks—a sort of subscription plan in which a publisher would “automatically route [the Open Library] a copy of ebooks that are coming out.” IA, he said, “could compensate them on a regular basis for those titles.”

Such an automatic model could be a fast and easy way to give the public access to lendable ebooks, while also compensating publishers in a systematic way. One stumbling block, however, is that many larger publishers are averse to the Open Library’s license-free model, in which IA buys ebooks from publishers outright before lending them. Still, many small independent publishers could take them up on it.

It’s another example of how IA is thinking outside the ebook lending box—and an idea worth watching.

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[…] the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), but luckily LJ Tech Editor David Rapp reported in this post on how big-name authors like Amanda Hocking want to be a part of Open Library project.
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